Wirepoints’ Mark Glennon on AM560’s Morning Answer
April 22, 2026
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Summary and audio linked here.
-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
"Even as most undergraduates returned to campuses for in-person classes in August and September, schools such as Southern Illinois and Indiana State University in Terre Haute have fewer students this fall than the previous one...Southern Illinois University in Carbondale is filling only critical positions when needed."
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Audio and summary Illinois bill would override local law to allow homeless living in all public parks – Wirepoints
April 14, 2026
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If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
Mark Glennon on AM560’s Morning Answer: Chicago Fiscal Crisis Worse Than Pre-Bankruptcy Detroit, HIV Surge and Public Health Threat From Open Borders Goes Unreported
April 10, 2026
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Summary and audio linked here.
Mark Glennon on AM560’s Morning Answer: Chicago pension buyout plan mostly shifts debt rather than eliminating it, property tax surge doubles inflation over three decades
April 3, 2026
9 Comments
Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
Firing non-tenured faculty is like eating your seed corn. Few other professions guarantee high-paid employment to non-performers whether faculty or administration. (So many of the jobs contribute little to student success.) Someone who wants to study Portuguese literature may have to go to Lisbon if the tenured Illinois guru can’t fill a card table with students. This will get worse as liberal faculty begins to cut survey courses designed to teach, say, Western Civilization. Tenure has its functions; so does the British monarchy and maybe gender studies. But there should be a balance of practicality (i.e. jobs after graduation) in… Read more »
I can’t think of any college in the free and prosperous Red States that is in real decline. In fact many have the ‘problem’ of rapid growth.
No one wants to Instagram their college experience from Macomb.
Lol! I grew up in very rural and isolated West – Central Illinois, and attended WIU for one quarter, was so bored, and then transferred to the Bright Lights & Big City of ISU in worldly Normal – Bloomington IL. Ye gawds, but this state’s college towns do suck most majorly…even to a hick like me they were all awful. At least SIU is a bit more “scenic”, but it’s 300 miles from nowhere… getting to either coast is less of an ordeal than getting to Carbondale.
It is difficult enough to attract college kids to these crappy towns when there are so many other choices. It’s only going to get worse when today’s minority-majority generation complain they feel unsafe in rural areas among the local white townies like it’s Deliverance or something.
This article purposely only tells half the story of declining college enrollment. I’m sure the authors did so in the name of equity. The untold story is that college students today and of the future are poorer, less likely to pay full tuition, and significantly less prepared, and often unqualified, to attend university. And large numbers of today’s high school graduates are not interested in attending college at all. You see, there are a few hundred thousand seats open at the top colleges each year. ie. Big 10, Ivy, flagships, highly selective…..these schools have endowments, rich benefactors, a good brand… Read more »
So the young man highlighted in the Yahoo article has gone through all this struggle to finish his degree and wants to land a career in “sports communication” – yet even on a safe campus space he had issues communicating his needs… What is the chance of him getting that dreamed – of career, do you think? IMO he is not making realistic and informed career decisions…
The best career path for lower – income kids is to try to get into a skilled trade. Training is free (usually via the WIOA program), of short duration, and jobs are very, very plentiful. Within five years or less can be making $100K, if you apply yourself and work hard. I work for a local non – profit that trains people for skilled manufacturing careers, e.g. welding, CNC. So many of our students come in with useless four – year degrees, in debt, and with nothing but low – skilled service gigs on their resumes. Health care is another… Read more »
I’m curious about the clients with useless degrees and large debt. Are they angry at society in general, or do they understand that their liberal professors sold them a giant sucking lemon? Seems we saw a lot of these young people rioting last summer. I feel for them too- they basically were screwed by the liberals in the higher education establishment. But I don’t think they see it that way.
Few if any of them have been paying their student loans since the pandemic started and all federal loans were paused. Its hard to get exact statistics of how many borrowers stopped paying but one financial article I read claimed “nearly all” have stopped paying. Biden is struggling to get people to start paying again, he’s thinking maybe in January but only after he wipes away the millions of defaults from their credit reports. Even before that, few borrowers paid their student loans. I read one statistic before the pandemic that half of all student loans were in non-payment status… Read more »
The people we see entering our program are usually too exhausted from trying to maintain a life of crappy service jobs, temp gigs and the like to be angry. We also carefully screen people for “attitude”, and they just want to buckle down and get serious about gaining a decent career…
My nephew, a cis-gendered white male in suburban Chicago, had a SAT score in the top 10% in the state. But this past year, he, like most of his white cis-gendered friends, declined to attend a traditional four year college. Some of his friends joined the military (big mistake now with Biden), others joined a trade, and my nephew just got a regular job but has no real drive to do anything else. When asked why, he will say that he comes from a working class family, and doesn’t want to go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to… Read more »
And this ennui is in large part fed by the Biden regime’s policies, e.,g. “Why work when your basic needs can be supplied by The State?” ….
Union apprentiship programs pay a salary while you learn. I was told by some of the people in charge of the programs that there are basic mathematics tests an applicant had to pass. I looked at one of the tests and a lot of the test was pretty much working with fractions. Based upon what I gather many of today’s high school grauates lack mathematics abilities so they are prevented from entering an apprentiship program. It seems hard to believe though because the high school teachers are math experts when they spew data about why they need a raise in… Read more »
I think its reasonably safecto say most teachers try to successfully engage most students but can’t do so wirh all. What that means in practical terms is they attend more to the skill levels of the middle 2/3 or 3/4 maybe) than those at the lower and higher ability extremes. To focus on those extremes means the larger middle-ability students will tune out. What would you do in a similar situation—devote most of your time and thought to the extremes in your classes or the larger numbers in the mid-ability levels? Chances are the more attention you devote to one… Read more »
“What that means in practical terms is they attend more to the skill levels of the middle 2/3 or 3/4 maybe)”
Which is just fine but the middle skills in the 10th grade level seem to be firmly stuck in the 6th grade level.
I agree. There are a myriad of reasons for it with many beyond the teachers’ control. Good, motivating parents are an attitude maker for their offspring while the rest usually are attitude breakers, and that’s far from being the only problem at work here.
I would agree. We’ve had folks test at a 6th – grade level. With intensive remedial instruction, we can get that up to a “normal” 10th – grade level. Many of these students have mentioned that our instructors are really good, now with our help they can “get it” and succeed and progress – they didn’t get that in their public schools…
Labor is hard work and kids today don’t want to do it. The culture has pushed feminist ideaology that looks down upon laborers and hard work. Especially when it comes to the dirtier careers like plumbing or concrete or welding. It’s hard, back breaking labor and women thumb their nose at it. So nobody wants to do it and it’s difficult to find employees. I had a conversation with a neighborhood plumber pre-pandemic who said he could barely get anyone to work. And the workers he had to train from scratch sucked. One guy he trained for six months, sent… Read more »
Yup. Although we actually have trained quite a few female welders and CNC machinists, they are excellent and have rewarding careers, and there is a big push to get women into the trades. And many disdain “physical” work. I used to work with nursing trainees. To start, you first have to get a CNA (nursing assistant) certification, and then progress to LPN, then a nursing degree. The CNA job is, quite frankly, a literal “shit” job. So, many Americans turn up their noses, but immigrants do not. The next step after the entry – level CNA is the LPN –… Read more »
Yep, “shop math” with lots of fractions is a must. Some ace right into the program, for those deficient we offer a remedial “bridge program” that gets them up to speed, everyone eventually gains those math skills. Also, blueprint reading, measuring, and especially for CNC basic programming skills are a must. CNC programming can be a separate career, very rigorous training needed for this highly desirable field. I am not on the “technical” side BTW, we have great instructors to impart that knowledge. We require at least a 10th grade level of math for eventual entry into the program. I’d… Read more »
The schools really are failing these kids. There should be a trades curriculum for some kids. At some point CPS has to admit that there’s a number of kids that just won’t be successful with the current curriculum.
Hope this continues. We need to break our youth free from the toxic indoctrination that has gone on for decades.
Good- These colleges and their liberal policies need to be exposed! No money!